ely penetrated an unseen ray of sacred light. There were young
boys praying, and old, wrinkled men, eagles of the desert, with fierce
eyes that did not soften as they cried the greatness of Allah, the
greatness of his Prophet, but gleamed as if their belief were a thing
of flame and bronze. The boys sometimes glanced at each other while they
prayed, and after each glance they swayed with greater violence, and
bowed down with more passionate abasement. The vision of prayer had
stirred them to a young longing for excess. The spirit of emulation
flickered through them and turned their worship into war.

In a second and smaller court before the portal of the mosque men
were learning the Koran. Dressed in white they sat in circles, holding
squares of some material that looked like cardboard covered with minute
Arab characters, pretty, symmetrical curves and lines, dots and dashes.
The teachers squatted in the midst, expounding the sacred text in nasal
voices with a swiftness and vivacity that seemed pugnacious. There
was violence within these courts. Domini could imagine the worshippers
springing up from their knees to tear to pieces an intruding dog of an
unbeliever, then sinking to their knees again while the blood trickled
over the sun-dried pavement and the lifeless body, lay there to rot and
draw the flies.

"Allah! Allah! Allah!"

There was something imperious in such ardent, such concentrated and
untiring worship, a demand which surely could not be overlooked or set
aside. The tameness, the half-heartedness of Western prayer and Western
praise had no place here. This prayer was hot as the sunlight, this
praise was a mounting fire. The breath of this human incense was as the
breath of a furnace pouring forth to the gates of the Paradise of Allah.
It gave to Domini a quite new conception of religion, of the relation
between Creator and created. The personal pride which, like blood in
a body, runs through all the veins of the mind of Mohammedanism, that
measureless hauteur which sets the soul of a Sultan in the twisted
frame of a beggar at a street corner, and makes impressive, even almost
majestical, the filthy marabout, quivering with palsy and devoured by
disease, who squats beneath a holy bush thick with the discoloured rags
of the faithful, was not abased at the shrine of the warrior, Zerzour,
was not cast off in the act of adoration. These Arabs humbled themselves
in the body. Their foreheads touched the stones.